


Amanuensis

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Home and Away [13]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 21:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7774513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: 'Any, any, "Your handwriting is beautiful!"'</p><p>Jonathan changed so much about himself to get by this time around, and he'd never thought to change something as basic, as unthinking as his handwriting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amanuensis

“Your handwriting is beautiful!”  
  
Jonathan glanced up at the woman standing before him, smiled briefly. “Thank you.” Women said his handwriting was beautiful, men said his handwriting was girly. Jonathan’s handwriting was mostly a product of his generation. He didn’t see what the huge fuss was, that kids these days weren’t learning cursive. He joked to Evan that someday soon cursive would be a secret language that kids couldn’t read. Evan pointed out that a lot of historical documents would be inaccessible to the next generations of historians if they couldn’t read cursive.  
  
Jonathan asked if Evan filled out his AARs in cursive.  
  
Evan said he only did it when he felt like annoying Sheppard.  
  
Jonathan finished filling out the service form and pushed it across the desk for the woman to sign, which she did. He handed her the carbon copy. “Have a good day, ma’am. Thanks for coming in.”  
  
The woman smiled. “Thanks so much for fixing my car in time.”  
  
“Not a problem.” Jonathan waved in farewell and turned to clean up his workstation, get his tools back into his toolbox before they accidentally got swept up into Krissy’s toolbox. Now that Dean was ensconced at the Academy, John Eric needed a new mechanic, and he’d picked up a girl named Krissy who was a couple of years ahead of Samuel in school, who was about as surly as Bobby but as good with her hands as John Eric. Also, her smaller hands were useful for getting into tight spots. Jonathan liked her. She just tended to be a bit careless about ownership of tools.  
  
She had few of her own and liked to borrow other people’s tools. Her tools were all easily identifiable as she’d painted all of them with a stripe of pink nail polish, which was a pretty surefire way to make sure neither Bobby nor John Eric tried to keep them. Jonathan, who’d worked with Sam Carter for the better part of a decade, had no qualms using something with pink on it. He did have some qualms about Krissy keeping his tools, though.  
  
He might have spent longer than necessary rearranging his socket wrenches, cleaning them off and turning them in the case so they were all facing the same way. He wasn’t nearly as fastidious with his tools as he’d been with his tac gear back during his black ops days.  
  
Not that he’d really had black ops days.  
  
Whatever. The memories were in him, part of them, and he was going to own them (and he planned on owning certain of them pretty thoroughly tonight when Evan got done with whatever latest random assignment Landry had given him).  
  
“You write like an old lady,” Krissy said. She hopped up on the counter like Samuel liked to do and eyed the form Jonathan had just filled out.  
  
“I’m neither old nor a lady,” Jonathan said, which was only partially true. “However I write, I write like a young man.”  
  
“That makes no sense.”  
  
“You got upset the other day because Bobby said you think like a man.”  
  
Anger flared in Krissy’s eyes. “Because I’m not a man. Just because I was being logical and defying gender stereotypes -”  
  
“I know,” Jonathan said calmly. “You think logically. And I have neat handwriting.”  
  
Krissy deflated. “Right. Okay. Fair enough.” She reached down, traced his lettering. “You know what you could totally do for money?”  
  
“Besides work on engines no one else around here can, for a really reasonable price?”  
  
“You could write anonymous love letters,” Krissy said. “Girls love that kind of thing, especially in pretty handwriting like this.”  
  
“Ah. Like an amanuensis.”  
  
“A what now?”  
  
“A professional handwriter,” Jonathan said. “Not much call for them after the invention of the printing press, really. You think girls would like getting mushy letters in my handwriting? You just said I write like an old lady. I can’t imagine many girls your age are into old ladies.”  
  
Krissy rolled her eyes. “I mean, if you did it all fancy, like with a wax seal, tied it with a ribbon. With your old-fashioned handwriting, it’d be really romantic.”

Something in Jonathan went cold. “You really think so?” Because he’d given Evan letters like those. He’d been very careful about the words he’d chosen in them, stuck to discussions about books and music and life, about Charlie and Sara, always careful to leave out full names, always signing them with just his initial. He’d used the ribbon because it was lying around and he couldn’t think of anything else to do with it. And the wax seals were pretty tamper-proof these days. So few people used them that most modern thieves and spies didn’t know how to unmake them and redo them.  
  
“It would be.”  
  
“You don’t think it’d be more romantic to get letters from someone you liked in their own handwriting?”  
  
“Well, not if it was a secret admirer,” Krissy said. She had a surprising romantic streak.  
  
“There’s a fine line between secret admirer and stalker, and I wouldn’t feel so comfortable walking it,” Jonathan said.  
  
“Think of the easy money. People send you what they want written, and you copy it out in your pretty handwriting, and they pay you, and they can send it how they want.”  
  
Jonathan eyed her. “You’ve been thinking about this awful hard, haven’t you?”  
  
“Well, I do have a pretty epic collection of wax seals you could borrow.”  
  
“Ah. And you’d want a share of the profits?”  
  
“Not a big one.” Krissy smiled guilelessly.  
  
“Right. Let me think about it.” Jonathan had a lot to think about - including warning Evan about what someone might say if they found the letters Jonathan had given him, because it was probably apparent from the content of the letters that the sender was male.  
  
Was it?  
  
Jonathan had gone to great lengths to do his best to blend in with the other teenagers his age, so in casual conversation he came off as a bit quirky, but not so strange people would think to investigate him, at least not when he was still a minor. He hadn’t thought to change his handwriting. Truth was, he didn’t use it much, computers being the main mode of communication, such as emails, but Bobby was a little old-fashioned, and he liked to fill out forms by hand, so everyone else at the shop did it too. (Samuel had nicer handwriting than Dean and Dean had often drafted Sam to fill out paperwork for him, which Samuel would do, grumbling about child labor laws all the while.)  
  
“Thought about it?” Krissy asked.  
  
“No, thinking about something else.” Jonathan closed the case of socket wrenches and stowed it in his toolbox.  
  
“You don’t have to answer right away,” Krissy said.  
  
“Thanks.” Jonathan turned away from her, reached for his jacket hanging up beside Bobby’s tool cabinet, and fished his cell phone out.  
  
He sent a single message to Evan. _Food?_ It was his way of asking Evan to come by for dinner if possible, without making it sound like they did something cozy and domestic every night.  
  
_Sorry, old Team Night,_ was Evan’s immediate response.  
  
Jonathan took a deep breath. _That’s cool. Some other time._ He understood the need for team time, even if it was with a former team.  
  
He also really, really needed to check over those letters.  
  
He hoped his one instance of thoughtlessness about his own handwriting wouldn’t ruin Evan’s world.


End file.
